Surprising Playoff Predictions

That Denver at +12500 to win the NBA championship and +5000 to win the WC is mis-priced. In fact, it’s almost certainly profitable as you’ll have hedge opportunities down the road.

I think PJ has haunted Karl his entire career.

The smarter books don’t care about balancing action. They’ll actually take a position and hope they have the liquidity to ride it out.

However, the more interesting thing is that the market is continually mis-priced. It depends how you think markets move. In the stock market, I would say most moves are the result of large institutional investors. In these sports markets, most big line movements are the result of smart bettors – they have to not only have superior handicapping skills to what’s generally available, but they have to have been successful for a long time in order to have the money to back their opinions and move markets. Eventually the books realize they’re getting hammered by the smart bettors, and lines start to move higher and higher in favor of the sharp team. This happened to Miami earlier this year. Against Cleveland, the line was something like Miami by 19 – which is unheard of.

This hasn’t happened to the Nuggets – the books are posting lines, and the sharp bettors aren’t betting them to the point where they’re efficient. This is obvious because the Nuggets keep beating the closing spread.

I agree! Don’t let him test the free agent market. Haha

Somewhere along the line they adjusted the odds before the trade – probably a lot of money came in on the Knicks. People haven’t realized how good the Nuggets are yet, and so money hasn’t come in on the Nuggets.

The fact that the Knicks are priced so much better than the Nuggets should immediately scream that the market is incorrect.

But what you probably didn’t know is the numbers I quoted above aren’t the Nuggets actual numbers since the trade deadline. They’re regressed to the mean – which means we’re using worse numbers and the result still comes out like that.

A bunch of role players that no one believed in. A coach who battled cancer and came back, jettisoned off the superstar and the team became better.

This story has everything you could possibly hope for.

you can’t compare the playoffs to the regular season, it is a true saying that the playoffs is a completely different beast than the regular season and we only have a tiny sample size of this team, and you can’t compare over blown statistics of the Nuggets beating the crap out of terrible teams as a means for the Nuggets to now all of a sudden be better than the Spurs, it is utter non sense.

Yup, I’m pretty much saying that we’re favorites against every single team in the west, at least with all the information we currently have.

The biggest intangibles that aren’t accounted for are 1. coaching, 2. ability to scheme against specific opponents. Also, us being favorites doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily win the west – it’s almost a coinflip with the Lakers and Spurs.

those elite teams have coaches who have a system, the players know the system, they are well running machines, meanwhile Ty Lawson still has trouble knowing that Gallo does not like receiving passes above his shoulders, and players who don’t even really know George Karls system, and many of our players are inexperienced, I would say our chances of beating the Spurs with them having home court advantage is not a coin flip, more around a 35-65 % with us being 35%.

The Big 3 may play more minutes, they may actually decide to increase the pace, etc.

But yeah, it’s harder to become a completely different team in the playoffs than you would think. Boston did it last year – look at Abbott’s stat geek smackdown and see how almost everyone missed the Celtics (including us) except for Jeff Ma.

I said what you did for a. I noticed we were awesome 2 or 3 games after the new players and said to myself “I’m curious if we can maintain that over what we would treat as a reasonable sample size” – we’ve reached a reasonable sample size, but there’s still obviously noise in it.

Where did you get this? Link?

Didn’t you read the part where he predicted Utah to win in 6 though we were the supposed favorites with home court advantage?
You should read the book stumbling upon wins it gives good insight into advanced stats and might change your mind about it.
In the end, the numbers tend not to lie and I am a huge believer in this. The Knicks aren’t, and I don’t think they will win a championship with Melo around.
I don’t think they will be as bad as they are now (even I didn’t think they would be this bad when I said Melo doesn’t care about winning), but they will never win a championship especially with Melo and Amare locked in for max contracts and a new CBA coming up I don’t see any help going their way.

There’s so much randomness and so little sample size in football…

I don’t really trust myself to make non-biased subjective arguments. I can’t tell you how many times the computer has spit out something where I’m like uuhhh…that can’t be right? Then it’s right and I’m like well, if I were doing this subjectively i woulda lost.

He deserves a lot of credit. I think a lot of times he preaches something, and wants his players to play a certain way and they don’t listen. After all, according to Mark Cuban, NBA players are head cases and the Mavs have to hire assistants to teach them how to eat, balance a checkbook, rent a place, etc.

If anybody has one, I am willing to test it out for the good of the group.

I kind of wanted to get out of my car and shout MARTY!

A TARDIS is the only real answer here.

Where We’re going we don’t need Roads.
Doc freakin Brown

I don’t know if Fabricio Oberto or Michael Finley were the main men is the 2007 Spurs team.
You had to account for Ginobili off the bench too.
I think depth is underrated in the playoffs. Wearing an opponent down with 10 good players could work.
I can’t think of a team this deep in a long time so I feel like there is no precedent for a team like this failing. Don’t tell me the Mavs are deep ( they are old and if you think JJ Barea is better than Ray Felton you are smoking some good stuff). Even the “deep” Orlando team had a good center but didn’t really have anyone else outside of the starting 5.
I am talking about top 10-15 player at each position and we are 2 deep at each position with a top 10-15 player. PF might be our weakest spot, but I still think KMart is top 15 because of his defense and Al can be good in stretches (ok he is not top 15, but he is not Malik Allen). Anyway Gallo will play PF too, so we don’t have to worry about that.
I digress, I still haven’t seen a team like this ever. Can anyone think of a team like this in the 90s or 00s ?

1. You have to dominate their starters on a reduced number of possessions to get to garbage time. If you have a lot of garbage time, it’s actually an argument that your team is better than the stats indicate. For example, a lot of our wins aren’t as close as the final scores would indicate because of garbage time.
2. A lot of times our backups were playing against their starters
3. Other teams have the same opportunity in terms of ability to blow teams out
4. That depth needs to be factored into the team’s overall performance. For example, AC played big minutes 2 years ago, even though he was a backup. The larger the sample of a team’s overall perforamnce the more accurate you’ll be.

This crazy squad may look nothing alike next year. Let’s enjoy this

3 teams that do this:

The Lakers, the Spurs, and the Celtics. It feels like they blow off whole games at a time in the regular season to save energy for the playoffs. Pop starts experimenting with lineups, Doc starts benching his guys and working on different things in practice, and it feels like the Lakers start trying.

On one of those Greatest games ever played shows in like 20 years. So just be on the lookout for it.

I mean, if I’m living in my parents’ basement and have 0 income, then 100% doesn’t mean much. To answer your question, it’s currently a small percentage of my total income – mostly because our BR is small compared to my other income streams (I’ve got a day job, poker income, and some self sustaining businesses). The important question is ROI and our return on capital is really good (although we did lose like 15% on Daniel Gibson to win the 3pt shooting contest).

If you’re curious as to what’s possible, check out this podcast:
http://www.pokerstatic.com/hot-seat/interview-with-haralabos-voulgaris/

Also, if you google SBR kelly calculator, figure out how many NBA games there are, play around with 53, 54, 55 and 56% edges and bankroll amounts.

I’d caution that it takes a certain mindset to be successful – not everyone is cut out for it. You need to be confident in the work and the math. When you have action on an event that has a 10% shot of happening because you’re getting the right price, you have to realize 9 out of 10 times you’re going to lose that amount and 1 out of 10 you’re going to make more than 10 times your money. It’s not necessarily hard to spot +EV opportunities (the New Orleans / Indy Super Bowl was grossly mis-priced). We’re basically running things like a hedge fund.

If you’re interested in handicapping properly, it’s A LOT of work. We spent 4 or 5 months, both of us at 10-15 hours a day on our weekends working on the current model. We’ve both probably put in another 500 hours each doing things like backtesting, refining, getting more data. That probably doesn’t include the original model we came up with, spent 100 hours on it, tracked it for a month, ran hot, backtested and realized we were break-even. There was also a lot of time spent to collect data over that many seasons…